Cutting, bribing, stealing: Some people get COVID-19 vaccines before it s their turn
Grace Hauck, USA TODAY
Bribing doctors. Circulating vaccination appointment codes. Chartering planes and impersonating essential workers.
More than a month since the USA began administering COVID-19 vaccines, many people who were not supposed to be first in line have received vaccinations. Anecdotal reports suggest people deliberately leveraged widespread vulnerabilities in the distribution process to acquire vaccine. Others were just in the right place at the right time. There s dozens and dozens of these stories, and they really show that the rollout was a complete disaster in terms of selling fairness, said Arthur Caplan, who heads the medical ethics division at the NYU School of Medicine. It wasn’t that we didn’t have consensus (on who should go first). We didn’t pay attention to logistics, and that drove distribution, not rules.
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Alabama
Clanton: The city has lost a second elected official to the coronavirus pandemic six months after the longtime mayor died of COVID-19. City Council member Sammy Wilson died Thursday while in a hospital where he was being treated for the illness caused by the new virus, WBRC-TV reports. A statement by Mayor Jeff Mims said the town of 8,800 people was thankful for Wilson’s service to the community. Council member Mary Mell Smith called Wilson’s death “a big loss.” “He had that big smile on his face every time you saw him,” she said. Wilson died about six months after Billy Joe Driver, who had served as mayor for 36 years before he died of COVID-19 in July. Mims was elected to replace Driver.
Authorities in Washington state on Monday told hospitals and other COVID-19 vaccine providers not to provide special access to people or risk having their supplies of doses cut.
Vaccine supply may be cut to Washington outlets that provide VIP access By Evan Bush and Sydney Brownstone, The Seattle Times
Published: February 2, 2021, 7:39am
Share: A vial with the COVID-19 vaccine is pictured at PeaceHealth Urgent Care Memorial on Tuesday morning, December 22, 2020. (Amanda Cowan/The Columbian)
The Washington State Department of Health on Monday told hospitals, clinics and other providers not to provide special access to coronavirus vaccines and warned they may risk supply reductions if caught.
“VIP scheduling, reserving doses for inequitable or exclusive access, and similar practices are banned and will not be tolerated,” said a DOH email to all enrolled vaccine providers. “If we find out a provider is giving out vaccine inequitably or is doing behaviors listed above or similar, we may reduce or stop allocations to that provider.”
In an email obtained by the Times, chief development officer Molly Stearns offered donors who had given more than $10,000 to Overlake special scheduling access for the vaccine.
“We’re pleased to share that we have 500 new open appointments in the Overlake COVID-19 vaccine clinic, beginning this afternoon and tomorrow (Saturday, Jan. 23) and next week, Stearns wrote. Access to the exclusive appointments was cut off after a policy adviser from Inslee s office contacted the hospital.
“If, in fact, they were giving preference to some VIP list, that’s not the way to do it. That is not acceptable for us. We need to give everybody a fair shot at the vaccine, Inslee said in a news conference. We’ve got to maintain public credibility in the system. I’m told that whatever they were doing has stopped, and that’s good news.”